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By David Manthos

Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, and other drilling practices have unlocked previously inaccessible reserves of oil and gas across the U.S. and the world. However, some of the debate over fracking is distorting public understanding of these practices and interfering with good decision-making about this recent boom in unconventional oil and gas production.

The track record of modern fracking is shrouded in incomplete information, a misleading history and distorted by semantic arguments. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

We often hear statements like this from industry and pro-drilling politicians:

America has drilled and fracked more than 1 million wells over the past 60 years, and in all that time there has never been a proven case of groundwater contamination caused by fracking.

America has drilled and fracked around 1.3 million wells over the past 60 years…

First, has fracking really been around for over 60 years? That depends on what you mean by fracking.

In 1947, Stanolind Oil—now Halliburton—completed their first conventional hydraulic fracturing operation using 1,000 gallons of water, chemicals and sand to frack a shallow Kansas well. Instead of dropping explosives down the well like the early Pennsylvania oilmen, drillers used a spare WWII aircraft engine as a pump to pressurize the fracking fluid and apply hydraulic force to the methane-bearing limestone. According to a patent filled in 1953, the first fracks used pressures as low as 700 pounds per square inch (psi). This accounts for much of fracking’s history, with small operations that were barely noticeable once they were completed.

In 1997, Mitchell Energy completed their first high-volume, slickwater hydraulic fracture operations using an average of 800,000 gallons of fracking fluid and 200,000 tons of sand on horizontally drilled wells in the Barnett Shale of Texas. This 16-year-old practice much more accurately represents the procedure that has recently unlocked natural gas from formations like the Marcellus Shale and oil from the Bakken Shale. We refer to this type of fracking as “modern fracking.”

Unlike their humble origins, modern fracking operations use millions of gallons of fluids pumped into bedrock at pressures as high as 15,000 psi to break open shale and tight sandstone formations. This is more than 20 times the pressure and 800 times the volume of the first fracking operations. Modern fracking has as much in common with early fracking as an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane has in common with the Wright Flyer. Yet advocates of modern fracking cite those decades of old-fashioned fracking as proof that modern fracking is also safe.

…and in all that time, there has never been a proven case of groundwater contamination…

Unconventional drilling and modern fracking was one of SkyTruth’s first projects, because satellite images and aerial photography revealed a spider’s web of roads, wellpads, pipelines and other infrastructure transforming massive tracts of western public lands. But as the practice spread from relatively uninhabited wilderness to the more populated eastern U.S., media coverage of modern fracking and fracking-related accidents began to increase. Journalists and academics began to investigate claims that modern fracking had caused health problems and water contamination. Then a documentary filmmaker from Pennsylvania ignited one of the biggest environmental movements in several generations: by lighting water on fire—again.

What we do know is that a growing list of individuals are coming forward with reports of illness and contaminated drinking water in the immediate vicinity of wells that that have been fracked. Is drilling and modern fracking the cause? In many cases we just don’t know because pre-drilling water quality and public health studies don’t exist, and the information is simply not available to the public.

…caused by fracking.

On these three words hinges a delicate and disingenuous argument about the safety of modern fracking. Watch congressional hearings on this subject and you will hear this qualifying statement tacked on to nearly every remark about the safety of drilling and modern fracking—but what does it mean?

Proponents of drilling use the term “fracking” in a very narrow (and technically accurate) way—referring exclusively to the well stimulation process known as hydraulic fracturing. Period. Based on this definition, only contamination caused by subterranean fractures that occurred during the process of hydraulic fracturing counts as contamination “caused by fracking.”

Meanwhile, the public generally uses the term “fracking” as shorthand to cover all of the activities related to drilling and completing a well. Since more than 90 percent of the drilling being done today would not be happening if it weren’t for hydraulic fracturing, this is understandable. Unfortunately there are many documented incidents where contamination of the air, land and water can and has occurred because of oil and gas drilling. And the homeowner who can light their tapwater on fire, or discovers they’ve been drinking cancer-causing benzene, probably doesn’t give a damn if the contamination was caused by a poor cement job that blew out, or by the hydraulic fracturing operation itself. That’s a word game only politicians and engineers care about.

The bottom line is the track record of modern fracking is shrouded in incomplete information, a misleading history and distorted by semantic arguments that narrowly define what counts as contamination from fracking. While cases of contamination caused by fracking remain obscured by lack of information and tricky linguistics, we know that a growing number of citizens are reporting harm and environmental contamination in unconventional oil and gas fields, and especially from wells that have been fracked.

Comments

forresttanaka

According to (http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=CRF1), the Cuyahoga river fires were caused by “an accumulation of oily wastes and debris on the river under 2 wooden trestles at the foot of Campbell Rd. hill, SE, in Cleveland.” That doesn’t have anything to do with methane in water, so I’m not sure why you include that non sequitur in your article.

The Wright Flyer is certainly different from an SR-71, but I call them both “airplanes.” The ENIAC and my laptop work very differently, but they’re both “computers.” Not sure what this semantic point is. Fracking has changed as different technologies and economies change, just as airplanes and computers change. I’m not understanding the point.

smytor

The point is that ordinary people speak of fracking as a general term covering all of the consequences and effects, mostly negative, of fracking on peoples’ lives, property values, etc., while the industry wants to constrain the definition of fracking to the activity itself, excluding all the consequences, which is convenient for them when they want to lie about the negative effects of fracking.

forresttanaka

I appreciate you replying. I see now you’re trying to include potential negative connotations of fracking into its definition. But — since you brought up the comparison with airplanes —isn’t this like saying that an airplane is a machine that flies and crashes, killing thousands of people? It seems you’re committing a textbook example of poisoning the well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well similar to the way some Christian fundies say that gay marriage involves immoral pedophiles that desecrate the institution of marriage.

David Manthos

Apologies for the slow response, I am the author of this post. The Cuyahoga and Gasland examples are merely part of the narrative of this history of fracking’s evolution, and the interesting coincidence that big movements were sparked by these fires. They may not have been the worst incidence or example of pollution, but they are icons of the movement. But I digress.

The aircraft comparison is indeed very semantic, that’s the point! Modern fracking is nothing like the original fracks, so we can’t say the safe track record of small, conventional fracking operations is proof that huge modern operations are safe. Furthermore, because of semantic arguments about what counts as contamination FROM fracking further obscures good decision-making.

People are worried about methane in their water because if that change suddenly occurs after drilling started – what else changed?

@davidmanthos

forresttanaka

Hey, thanks very much for replying!

The Cuyahoga example isn’t really part of the fracking story though; that was an example of industrial waste dumped into a river, not shooting water and chemicals into deep rock. And according to that report I linked to, the Gasland water-on-fire story became part of the fracking story only because Gasland connected them; the reality was that the guy’s well was surrounded by naturally occurring methane; not unusual in many areas as far as I can tell.

I agree we can’t say older forms of fracking implies anything about the safety of modern fracking. But it also doesn’t necessarily mean modern fracking causes water contamination or earthquakes, or that dissolved methane in water causes problems. I see people jumping to that conclusion, but only proper peer-reviewed studies can make that causal claim, and as far as I can tell, no study has been able to make that connection, and maybe there hasn’t been enough studies done; I don’t know. But we can’t say either way until that *is* done, and given the current evidence, I’d say the onus is on those who make these claims to come up with the evidence, properly, scientifically, and without prejudice.

What I mostly worry about is that one side of the climate change debate denies it’s happening, and the other side denies technologies that could help, like fracking and nuclear. The only road left, as I see it, is complete disaster. Either someone’s gotta compromise, or everyone needs to lift off the veils of ideology and focus on cold, unemotional scientific studies, not movies.

Jim Young

Did anyone pay attention long enough to get the much delayed Stanford report (http://www.stanford.edu/~meehan/la/pubs/pubross.pdf) on the 1985 Ross Store explosion in the Fairfax area? Seems the industry “speculators” confused the issue just long enough to get a low settlement requirement, but well before the Stanford study showed the more likely cause (I believe over stimulation pressure, if the study and local sources are being interpreted properly). I think they now depend very much more on arbitration, through who knows how fair or unfair a system, given the new reliance on non-disclosure agreements. (How about some Grand Jury investigations of past cases, where the non-disclosure agreements don’t keep sworn jurors from hearing it?)

Seems they always point to any misconception on a particular case, as if that amazingly occurs in every case, for decades, too. I’m wondering how many other entities were brought to justice (or some form of improved practices) if it is always someone else’s fault. Where is there even a beginning of any balance in damage remediation (much less compensation) commensurate with actual damage?

Looking at the reported arbitration agreement reported at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/chevron-awarded-96-million-for-1990s-ecuador-oil-export-dispute.html, I thought I had to have the victims reversed. Somehow Chevron gets $96 million from Ecuador. “Ecuador overstated domestic crude demand to boost its share
of production from the Texaco-operated wells, and then sold the
oil on the international market, depriving Texaco of profits,
Robertson said. Texaco was acquired by Chevron in 2001.” That does make a tiny bit of sense, but seems grossly out of balance with the damage done by Texaco (before Chevron acquired it). Makes me very very wary of arbitration and non-dislcosure agreements that seemed to have ramped up as rapidly as the new, to me, extreme, fracking.

I have not yet found even one industry spokesman, or supposed government regulator, that I feel I can trust as much as local citizens and some lower tier industry people that apparently don’t get the talking point memos.

PrMaine

there has never been a proven case of groundwater contamination caused by fracking.

This word, “proven” is a commonly used qualifier used to obfuscate. After all, if there remains even one person who doesn’t believe what someone says then you can say it is not proven – even if the claim is accepted as fact by the vast majority of the world’s scientists. And certainly if no court has agreed with a claim then you can say it is not proven – even if it has never been addressed by a court.

And in the particular case of fracking, if it is a failed cement job or other leak of a pipe going through an aquifer that causes contamination then you can legitimately say it is not the fracking that caused the contamination, it was the leaky pipe used for fracking. It depends on what the meaning of “fracking” is – or maybe what the meaning of “is” is.

wrymind

Any term for fracking that leaves out the word terrorism is total euphemism.

diaph

By the fact that virtually our entire country is under attack (aside from VT etc., where there is no gas/oil), it is clear that we no longer have a democracy. Our politicians have sold out. If terrorists came and did the things frackers are doing here, our government would hunt them down and kill them.